Nintendo 3DS Unveils at E3: 3D, Without Glasses

Nintendo unveiled a portable, glasses-free 3D gaming system. But how do they do it?

Nintendo unveiled the 3DS system today, which is the successor to the famous portable Nintendo DS. It still sports the double screen layout, but one of the screens has a magic new capability—3D...without glasses! How does Nintendo do that? By all accounts, the company is using Sharp's parallax barrier screen technology, which filters the pixels of the screen through precisely oriented slits to ensure that the left and right eyes only see the pixels they are supposed to see. The downside, as demonstrations today have shown, is that the 3D effect is limited to a dead-on straight view of the screen—from the sides, the 3D effect disappears. Not so great for big screen TVs, but an excellent solution for single-player portable gaming devices.

Other details include:

-An analog slide button to the left of the touchscreen that will act as a joystick.